Joan Miró

Tracing Miro's career, this book begins in the 1920s with the artist's introduction to surrealism, cubism, and dadaism, and the flowering of his friendships with Picasso, Braque and other influential artists and poets. It moves on to his creation of an iconographic pictorial style, which reached maturity in the 1940s and forever distinguished Miro from his contemporaries. Nearly one hundred of his greatest works reproduced in this book display the artistic range of this lyrical painter, whose brilliant use of color, line and shape resulted in haunting compositions. Fascinating photographs depict the artist at various stages of his life and perceptive essays about his work round out this exciting perspective of the world as portrayed in Miro's art.

The publication presents Joan Miro's (1893- 1983) mural art in the context of his life's work. Miro's ideas for large-scale mural art can be traced back to his works of the 1920s and the inspiration he drew from the bare walls of his family home in Montroig (Catalonia) and those of his studio in Paris. Miro gave priority to simple and essential forms, and declared the wall to be the very essence of his imagery. With its imperfections, it became the starting point for pictures in which Miro recorded its material beauty with meticulous attention to detail and great poetry. This book, and the exhibition it accompanies, takes its cue from the Kunsthaus Zurich's mural Oiseaux qui s'envolent, which will be the subject of a long overdue evaluation. It includes texts by renowned Miro scholars on his serial working practice, his ceramic production and mural works, together with unpublished material on the origins of his famous triptychs series.